Eugene > Eugene's Quotes

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
― Oscar Wilde (attributed to)

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
― Oscar Wilde

“No good deed goes unpunished.”
― Oscar Wilde

“What of Art?
-It is a malady.
--Love?
-An Illusion.
--Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
--You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
--What are you?
-To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde , The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
― Oscar Wilde

“One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Only the shallow know themselves”
― oscar wilde

“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Stories

“Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The one charm about the past is that it is the past.”
― Oscar Wilde